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Electron vs wxWidgets: What are the differences?
What is Electron? Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub. With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.
What is wxWidgets? It is a cross platform GUI library. It is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. It has popular language bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby and many other languages, and unlike other cross-platform toolkits, it gives applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. It's also extensive, free, open-source and mature.
Electron and wxWidgets can be primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" tools.
Some of the features offered by Electron are:
- Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.
- Electron is open source
- maintained by GitHub and an active community.
On the other hand, wxWidgets provides the following key features:
- Support for gesture events (GSoC 2017 project)
- Getting JavaScript code return value from wxWebView (also GSoC 2017 project)
- New wxSecretStore class for securely storing user passwords
Electron is an open source tool with 76.4K GitHub stars and 10K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Electron's open source repository on GitHub.
Pros of Electron
- Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications66
- Open source51
- Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code13
- Because it's cross platform7
- Use Node.js in the Main Process3
Pros of wxWidgets
- Native looking UI5
- Learning Curve4
- Cross platform3
- Permissive license. Commercial with static linkage.2
- Open source2
- Pure C++ code1
- Python1
- Performance1
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Cons of Electron
- Uses a lot of memory18
- User experience never as good as a native app8
- No proper documentation4
- Does not native4
- Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs1
- Wrong reference for dom inspection1
Cons of wxWidgets
- Uses Qt for GUI (wxQt)1
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What is Electron?
What is wxWidgets?
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